Читать книгу Murder of a Startled Lady - Charles Fulton Oursler - Страница 6

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Three of us were walking through deserted streets of downtown New York at the dark hour of eleven. In the middle was Police Commissioner Thatcher Colt, top-hatted, muffled, silent. I marched with him on the building side of the pavement while near the curb was District Attorney Merle K. Dougherty, always over weight, and puffing slightly as he kept pace with Colt's long-legged strides. We were on our way to Police Headquarters; Lafayette Street was a lighted but lonely ravine. Half in jest and I think wholly in earnest, Dougherty was wishing for some excitement.

"You know, Thatch, a reporter was telling me, to-night—I need to give the public a good show. They're ready for it."

Thatcher Colt gave a chuckling sigh as if over a lost soul. "You mean you could do with a nice, juicy crime before election?"

"Now, Thatch—don't be crude!"

Only half a block from the corner of Broome Street gleamed the pale green lights of 240 Centre Street, the heart of New York's police force. The gray-fronted building, with its fussbudget façade, was like home to me now, for this was Thatcher Colt's third year as Commissioner and I had been his secretary from the beginning.

"You don't have to worry about the election," Colt declared, a hand on the District Attorney's shoulder. "New York will never let you get out of public office; you're too popular. And please don't go wishing for any first page hullabaloo—Tony and his wife and I wish to get away to Miami Beach for a couple of weeks."

"Just the same," wheezed the District Attorney, swinging his stick like a Broadway leading man, "I could do with a hot court trial——"

"With a love angle in it, no doubt?" I bantered, waving a pre-morning tabloid.

"That's it, Tony. A crime of passion!"

"And a triumphant solution?"

"Of course!"

"By the police department."

"Sure!—No! That is——" Dougherty snorted, and shook his head. "Certainly—I mean—working with——"

"An aggressive District Attorney."

"Exactly! Tony's got it right, Thatch! What can we do about it? We need a murder!"

As if the fate—or the furies—had heard and answered the district Attorney's prayer, a little man stepped out of the shadows beside the open door of Headquarters. He was pug-nosed, spectacled, bowler-hatted, overdressed—I recognised him as Sherman, a third-grade detective, inclined to be talkative, but a hard worker.

"Excuse me, Mr. Commissioner." He saluted. "I know this is all irregular bracing you this way but I wanted a word with you personal, and I know you generally drop in downtown after theatre—I made an arrest to-night and now I hope I didn't do the wrong thing."

"What's on your mind, Sherman?"

Colt had halted within the foyer of Headquarters; twin flights of wide marble steps rose left and right to the main lobby; a central flight of stairs led into a basement, the offices of the fingerprint and photographic bureaus. Sherman went on:

"The case I mean is mixed up with a big shot who says he knows you—a man named Gilman."

"Professor Leslie Gilman?"

"That's him—a highbrow college guy."

Colt cast me a hasty and slightly harassed glance. We both knew Leslie Gilman, a chemist of international renown, a physicist. He and Colt were old friends. But of late Professor Gilman had taken up psychic phenomena seriously, and since then we had seen little of him—the Commissioner distrusted occultism and mysticism of every kind. "Is Professor Gilman in any trouble?"

"He's making trouble, that's what he's doing—said he would break me in the department—that's what he said, on account of a pinch I made."

"What is this all about?"

"A bunch of spiritualists! They call it a church."

"And that's what it probably is," Colt rebuked him. "With the same legal rights as any other church. Why did you do it?"

"To catch a ghost," replied Sherman, righteously. "We had complaints—a man and his wife were giving private séances and exhibiting ghosts at three dollars per exhibit—and so we just pulled the joint on a disorderly conduct charge."

"And got what?"

"We got forty yards of cheese cloth daubed with luminous paint out of the spirit medium's bosom."

Colt made a wry face. Such cases always stirred him to low, dull anger.

"How does Gilman fit into this mess?"

"Well, when we locked up the Reverend Washington Irving Lynn and wife—2178 West Eighty-sixth Street——"

"The Lynns were what you called the mediums?"

"Not what I call them—that's what they call themselves—I don't call them anything but God damn—anyhow, the Lieutenant at the Twentieth Precinct—the West Sixty-eighth Street Police station—was a softie and let them use the telephone—oh, I know, they have a legal right to one call—and they called Gilman. So then Gilman gets down to the station house, talks with the prisoners, and starts yelling for you, Mr. Commissioner. He tells me, as the arresting officer, if I don't get his message to you it will go hard with everybody concerned. I told him the New York Police Department wasn't run by in-floo-ence, no matter who it was."

"The message?"

"I know it sounds screwy, Mr. Commissioner, but Professor Gilman told me to tell you that the Lynns were positively genuine mediums and could really and truly talk with the remains of the dead."

"Was that all?"

"That was all—except a lot of hooey about how the Lynns could tell you about a murder."

"About a what?" barked Dougherty. Until now he had been totally indifferent, stamping large, cold feet.

"Mrs. Lynn, the female of the mediums, is supposed to have got a message from what she calls her spirit guy——"

"Spirit guide!" corrected Dougherty.

"And the spirit guy brought in a girl that had been murdered and the body buried——"

"Where?"

Sherman laughed.

"They wouldn't tell me! All they want is to get their names in the papers. Well, now they'll get it, plenty."

"Hell's breeches!" grumbled Dougherty. "I thought it was something important. Let's get going, Thatch."

The Police Commissioner looked puzzled; his sombre brown eyes parried mine with a thoughtful question.

"It's an odd message," he murmured. "Where is Gilman now?"

"Up at the Sixty-eighth Street Station, trying to raise bail for those Lynns."

"Get him down here to-morrow—I'll be in my office after ten."

And as the little detective hurried unhappily off, Colt added to us:

"No use in seeing him to-night—nothing to it, of course—it's just a duty I owe to an old friend gone wrong."

"Whatever you say," answered Dougherty with an affable grin. "If I played my hunches, though, Thatch—I'd see him now."

I was anxious to get home. I had promised Betty, my wife, to be back in my mother's home in Scarsdale, where we were visiting, soon after midnight. So I told the Commissioner I would take a look at my desk upstairs and then catch the eleven forty-five out of Grand Central Terminal. As I was explaining this, Colt led the way up to the central corridor, where he stopped at the information desk. A policeman is always on duty there, enclosed in three sides of glass, his back to the solid wall, reporters drift to him and away from him, and messages of black deeds tumble down to him in a crooked tube that runs from the telegraph bureau on the top floor. To-night Old Tim Dubble was in charge; at the sight of the Commissioner he stood up and saluted.

"Good-evening, Sergeant—all the animals in their cages?" asked Colt, with a friendly smile.

"Mr. Commissioner, it's as quiet as a deaf-and-dumb man's grave," answered Dubble, solemnly.

"What will the headlines be in the papers to-morrow?" the Chief asked; he knew that Tim Dubble heard everything from the reporters.

"Not much except a lot of hot air from Washington. One thing, though—that beautiful girl who married a Spanish duke some years ago has run away from him—said he beat her—she's back in New York—what was her name, now?"

Under the tan of his lean, long face, Thatcher Colt changed colour slightly, his sombre brown eyes widened, off guard for a tortured moment; before I could stop Old Tim he drumbled on:

"Oh, yes—Florence Dunbar. She's in New York to-night!"

Florence Dunbar! I knew the name. So did Dougherty. Neither of us would look at Colt. It was no time to look at him. In that instant I recalled a photograph that hung on the wall of Thatcher Colt's library; the only picture in that huge quiet room, and, aside from the pictures of his mother and father, which he kept on his dressing-table, the only photograph in the entire house that he called home. Often I had looked at that portrait and wondered what manner of girl had owned the beautiful face that half-smiled, half-chided the world she gazed at. Florence Dunbar—who had once been engaged to marry Thatcher Colt! She had a remote, legendary beauty; you felt somehow that she spoke strange languages, and understood least of all what we hedonists call "civilisation." Yet there was a wistful glimmer in her large, dark eyes, and a soft womanliness in the rich masses of black hair in a day of bobs. Only the imperious tilt to her head, the aristocratic curve to the proud sharp nose set her apart, as if she were quite unattainable, and knew it to her sorrow. None of Colt's later friends or associates had met Florence Dunbar, yet they all had a wise and knowing look when they referred to her. Once and once only Colt had spoken of her to me. Looking at the portrait, he had quoted the bitter lines of Rudyard Kipling:

"Lived a woman wonderful

(May the Lord amend her)

Neither simple, kind, nor true,

But her pagan beauty drew

Christian gentlemen a few

Hotly to attend her!"

Now the woman who had quarrelled with him and in her pique married a Spanish nobleman was back in New York. What would this mean to Colt? His voice sounded impassive, crisp, as always:

"What else is exciting, Tim?"

"The only thing that's happened to-night is an attempted suicide a few minutes ago—one of the night's catch up at the Sixty-eighth Street Police Station—a woman it was. She had been sent down to the West Thirtieth Street Station, where they keep the she-prisoners."

"What was her name?" asked Thatcher Colt.

"Lynn—Eva Allen Lynn. She's a fortune-teller, Mr. Commissioner—young woman and pretty, too, they told me."

The Commissioner's dark eyes kindled.

"I feel like working to-night, Dougherty—all night, if necessary," he snapped. "Maybe Gilman has got something worth listening to. Find Sherman, Tim. Tell him to bring Professor Leslie Gilman down here!"

I understood. If Colt went home and tried to sleep, thoughts of Florence Dunbar would keep him awake. I hoped he would not let that old dead ghost get him by the heart again. That would indeed be tragic.

"Well, Dougherty—want to stick?"

Dougherty rolled his eyes at Colt.

"Sure I do, Thatch!"

The Commissioner looked sombrely at me. I decided to stay.